After conducting the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference for over seven months, we can now disseminate the following information with the authority and confidence of those who have thoroughly investigated a crime scene. There are many research articles, investigative reports and penetrating exposes archived at the following website. Particularly those posted from August through November provide a unique body of evidence, many with compelling photo-documentaries, which portray the true state of affairs at the Macondo Prospect in the GOM.

In 2006, a corroded pipeline leaked 200,000 gallons of oil on to the tundra in the worst leak in the history of the North Slope. The company was sentenced to three years’ probation and ordered to pay $20m (£12.5m) in criminal penalties and restitution.

The leak in 2009 occurred when a pipeline at the BP-operated Lisburne oil field burst, leaking nearly 46,000 gallons of crude and oily water near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. After roughly 165 days of low-temperature warnings, BP found ice in the pipe. Fifteen days later, operators discovered the rupture.

Investigators said BP operators had “failed to respond to the alarms and failed to investigate or troubleshoot the cause of the alarms” and argued that BP should have known better, as it had suffered a similar ruptures in other frozen pipelines as far back as 2001.

“We’re more concerned about the dispersant and the dispersant mixed with oil–the dispersed oil, if you will–than we are about the crude oil itself.” Tests conducted in recent months by[University of Southern Maine Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health director John] Wise’s lab, using human cell lines, show that dispersants cause cell death and DNA damage, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive problems.

Rodney D. Soto, medical doctor for the Younger You Institute in Santa Rosa Beach, recently started testing and treating patients in relation to high levels of volatile solvents in the blood stream that he says may be linked to BP’s oil spill in the Gulf. “What I am concerned most about is a long-term effect, that won’t even show up for years, but are going to have tremendous implications in human immune system and hormonal function and brain function,” Soto said. These compounds (petroleum and dispersants) are liposoluble; meaning they have a “high affinity for fat,” Soto said. While the clinic specializes in “anti-aging and aesthetic medicine,” Soto points out that he is a medical doctor licensed in two states. He said the medical community has been monitoring the spill’s impact but has failed to develop adequate treatment methods.

The goal was to simulate a blowout or pipeline rupture in deep water. The results from these measurements show that the rising of the oil through the water column represents a kind of a “stripping” process of some of the most toxic compounds in the oil, resulting in a portion of the most toxic compounds is left in the water column.

Suddenly BP’s oil disaster is getting an unusually high amount of positive publicity. Media reports are concluding that most of the oil has disappeared. The static kill has been successful at holding back the oil pressure, and the U.S. government issued a scientific report suggesting that 75 percent of the 4.9 million barrels of oil that gushed into the Gulf as been burned, dispersed or evaporated. But even if you assume that all of the dispersed oil has been degraded, there are still an estimated 1.3 million barrels out in the environment — five times the amount of oil released during the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. People observing beaches in southern coastal states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida say they are still covered with oil and Corexit 9500, the chemical dispersant BP sprayed to break up the oil and remove it from view. Vast areas of ocean that used to be abundant with sea life show little signs of life anywhere. Plastic bags full of dead sea birds and oil are filling landfills in the south. If millions of gallons of oil have evaporated, what are the consequences for the air quality in the Gulf? Residents have reported that in areas normally besieged by mosquitos, there is now little need for repellant. Despite the rosy reports suddenly filling the airways, damage still appears to be ongoing. There is still plenty of oil in the Gulf that cannot, and will not, be cleaned up, and that will continue to wreak damage on the environment and the economies of Gulf states.

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process.

From environmentalists and wildlife specialists to fisherman and businessmen along the Gulf Coast the message is the same: BP is not only strangling the news of what is actually occurring in the Gulf of Mexico with the oil disaster but has co-opted key federal regulatory and oversight agencies to advance its agenda and that of its oil partners, including Halliburton, Anadarko, and Transocean…The EPA is also remaining mute on air quality reports from Venice that show that on May 7 hydrogen sulfide in the air was measured at 1192 parts per billion. Five parts per billion is considered hazardous to human health. In addition, the May 7 reports show that benzene levels in the air were measured at 5000 parts per billion, again in the health danger zone. Propylene glycol, a major component in Corexit 9500, is being measured in Gulf waters at 150 times its lethal concentration.

For quite some time, many bloggers and journalists following the BP-Corexit story, including me, have made the allegation that BP may have been experimenting by dumping over a million gallons of toxic dispersants into the ocean because they were desperately trying to prevent the oil from hitting the beaches.

Well, Corexit is one of a number of dispersants, that are toxic, that are used to atomize the oil and force it down the water column so that it’s invisible to the eye. In this case, these dispersants were used in massive quantities, almost two million gallons so far, to hide the magnitude of the spill and save BP money. And the government—both EPA, NOAA, etc.—have been sock puppets for BP in this cover-up. Now, by hiding the amount of spill, BP is saving hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in fines, and so, from day one, there was tremendous economic incentive to use these dispersants to hide the magnitude of the gusher that’s been going on for almost three months…..

People who work near [Corexit] are hemorrhaging internally [but the] EPA now is taking the position that they really don’t know how dangerous it is, even though if you read the label, it tells you how dangerous it is.… for example, in the Exxon Valdez case, people who worked with dispersants, most of them are dead now. The average death age is around fifty. It’s very dangerous, and it’s an economic—it’s an economic protector of BP, not an environmental protector of the public.

BP has dumped almost two million gallons of dispersants from Nalco in the Gulf of Mexico that is disguising the extent of the Deepwater spill and the inability of existing technology to mitigate the disaster. Even if BP eventually staunches the hemorrhage of oil, devastating toxins will linger for decades.

For example, in one approval request, one of BP’s top executives, Doug Suttles, claimed that the maximum daily application of dispersants on the surface in the days preceding June 16, 2010 was 3,360 gallons on June 12. However, an examination of the dispersant totals BP provided to congressional staff in its daily “Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Response Updates” indicates that on June 11, BP said it applied 14,305 gallons of the chemical on the surface; on June 13, 36,000 gallons; and on June 14, 10,706 gallons.

According to publicly disclosed amounts on DeepwaterHorizonResponse.com, more than 1.8 million gallons of toxic dispersants were used to break up the oil as it came out of the well, as well as after it reached the ocean surface. The validity of those numbers are now in question.

“It’s a lot thicker then you see on TV. It’s a lot worse. It’s everywhere. The smell is outrageous. People (were) getting sick all the time. They don’t really tell you what it is, why people are getting sick, but they were MedEvac-ing people left and right,” Bourgeois said. “I have personally dealt with headaches and feeling bad. It’s a lot different then what you see sitting at the house.”

The combination of millions of gallons of oil and dispersants has made large areas of the Gulf toxic and dangerous, marine toxicologist Ricki Ott saying if she lived there with children she’d leave – based on her firsthand experience after the 1989 Prince William Sound, Alaska Exxon Valdez disaster and subsequent research, documented in her books titled, “Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill” and “Not One Drop – Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.”

Ongoing today, the legacy includes criminal negligence, bankruptcies, destroyed lives and livelihoods, domestic violence, severe anxiety, trauma, PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse, serious illnesses, suicides, massive loss of plant and wildlife, and vast ecological destruction from the 30 million or more gallons spilled, the State of Alaska’s conservative estimate, not Exxon’s 11 million figure, its lowball claim to hide the disaster’s magnitude and minimize its liability.

The Gulf catastrophe is infinitely greater, estimates up to three or more Exxon Valdez incidents (using Exxon’s figure) a week until capped. Yet some experts think another seabed hole (a few miles from the Macondo well) is emitting 100,000 or more barrels daily, greatly compounding the growing disaster, added to more by numerous small leaks, five or more alone in BP’s Macondo well – the “well from hell,” according to some.

The evidence is growing stronger and stronger that there is substantial damage beneath the sea floor. Indeed, it appears that BP officials themselves have admitted to such damage. This has enormous impacts on both the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, and the prospects for quickly stopping the leak this summer.

The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.

Not food, not clean water, not makeshift shelters, but the swine flu vaccine?

Now it looks as if our concerns were correct, and the nation may have put more than a billion dollars into the medical equivalent of a mirage. This week, the British medical journal BMJ published a multi-part investigation that confirms that the scientific evidence just isn’t there to show that Tamiflu prevents serious complications, hospitalization, or death in people that have the flu. The BMJ goes further to suggest that Roche, the Swiss company that manufactures and markets Tamiflu, may have misled governments and physicians. In its defense, Roche stated that the company “has never concealed (or had the intention to conceal) any pertinent data.

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate, widely used as evidence of hunger, by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts? Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”-the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so-like health care or education-quality food for all is a public good.”… “I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.” Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.

News of a large group of landless young people invading a farm tends to bring images of revolution. And NC-based Crop Mob does indeed have revolution in mind, but the group’s methods are more about giving than taking. As I noted in my original post on Crop Mob, the organization is part of a wider resurgence of young people taking up farming. It was borne out of a discussion group on the problems facing young farmers, but rather than sit around talking about challenges, the group decided it was better off getting things done. So, armed with hoes, shovels, wheelbarrows, and bucket-loads of good will, the Mob has been descending on local farms to offer a helping hand. And after a full year of Mobbing, the idea is spreading.

A cynic might look at a program like the Edible Schoolyard — the much-lauded school garden initiative launched by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters — and wonder if such a thing would be possible outside the favorable growing climes (and foodie sensibilities) of California, and without the support of a famous chef. But as a moving article by a young teacher in rural Arizona shows, the answer is a resounding “yes.”

The Transition Handbook should be helpful to you if you are a proponent of planned energy descent and independence from fossil fuels and would like to start a Transition Town of your own. The transition model emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye and unleash the collective genius of their own people to find the answers to this big question: for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive